Cheery text from my one Asian-Canadian friend.

After I texted my one Asian-Canadian friend to tweak a graph for an article I was making, he replied –

Oh…  I totally forgot.  I’ll do it now.  also!  Patti Smith made me cry at [music festival].  She’s amazing.

. . .

I do love people’s texts.  

I esp. appreciated my friend's excited transition with “also!”, then the change into a totally unrelated subject.

I also like that he was moved by Patti Smith, who I respect a lot.

She really has deep visceral response to and love of art.

Crosswords run in my family.

When I was visiting my parents over Labor Day, I needed an eraser for the puzzles I was doing and asked my mom where I could get one, and she got me the one that my dad keeps out for doing crossword puzzles by the TV.

“Though I’ll need to use it less than him,” I was like.

Then, I asked when he exactly he had started to do crossword puzzles, anyhow.

“Ever since he retired,” she was like, then paused.  

“Wait, it goes farther back than that.  He used to do them at lunch back at [the Catholic high school he worked at and I went to].  Everyone used to gather around and do them, especially [the math teacher’s last name] and [the history teacher’s last name].”

Then, she said that sometimes even “that asshole priest” would join in if he was around the high school campus at lunch time, “though once the answer to a clue was ‘bordello’ and he got real quiet and didn’t say anything.”

(My mom calls this one then-40-year-old priest with a moustache and an authoritarian complex and trouble relating to people “that asshole priest”, though sometimes if he’s around my dad will defend him and say he’s not all bad.)

Drinks in a bar in my hometown: Restroom directions.

When I was back in my hometown over Labor Day weekend, I had a drink at this converted railroad depot bar with hanging martini glasses and old weathered painted wood furniture and Christmas lights behind the bar, and while I did that I read a book (an escaped polygamist’s wife’s tale!) and waited for my one friend to show up.

After she did that and we were talking for a bit, she asked the girl who was at the bar where the restroom was, and she got a bunch of complicated directions in return (something like, “go to the end of the bar, turn right, walk down the hallway, turn right at the men’s restroom, go past the door of the open room, turn left,” and then a couple more directions).

“Wow,” I was like, “That sounds complicated.  You’re lucky no-one just calls it quits and goes and takes a piss in the lounge near the men's room.  That might happen after a few drinks, you know.”

“We do have that fountain in there!”, the bartender was like, this younger (white) girl with darker hair and very white skin and a stint in the armed services, if her talk with her co-workers was to be believed.  “Seriously, though, every time I find the door, I’m like, am I in Narnia?”

A late night text from my one friend who teaches modern Czech literature:

Can you explain to me why the straight world is so into Tilda Swinton?

. . .

That’s a very good question – and one I don’t have an answer for, just a mild thought that maybe it might do with androgyny or her icy skin?

Texts on shit from my one friend who teaches modern Czech literature.

After I texted my one friend who teaches modern Czech literature about Shit Bit – she’d love one and totally would do it! – she texted me back:

You’re telling this to someone who’s been peeing out of her anus all day.  I mean crazy diarrhea.

I also had texted her about my morning shit where my bowels went “BWHEH”, and she said:

What?  No pictures?  You’ve got to document that shit.

. . . 

Addendum.

I forgot –

I also wonder, if Shit Bit really took off and there were national rankings, would some people try to game their shit to make their way up the rankings?

I could imagine people eating heavy food and trying their best to keep it in for as long as they could, then letting it go all at once.

My innovation idea: Shit Bit.

3 of my friends from my hometown are obsessed with “Fit Bit”, the smartphone-integrated biometric device that’s a pedometer, heart rate reader, REM sleep monitor, and whatnot, and use it to keep track of walking/running levels and compete with family through having stats automatically loaded online.

Meanwhile, my bowels were fucked up like they always are when I visit my parents – I eat a lot of food and too much junk to boot – and for days I had just been eating and eating, and yet I was surprised since only little brown ropes of shit were coming out the other end, and only like maybe once a day.

That is, until my morning shit 3 days in where after my 2^nd cup of coffee I really needed to go, and I walked to the bathroom and sat down and like right away my bowels went “BWEH”, and it’s like a bucketful of shit came straight out of my colon and filled up the bowl, with a little splash up the back side.

I figure, it was all the shit I had been holding back up inside of me. 

Anyhow, later that day as I was finding out that the 3^rd of my 3 friends I had seen over the trip had a Fit Bit, I realized, that I would much prefer a “Shit Bit”, a bracelet that sees how big your shit is, and is linked into your smartphone so you can compete against friends to see who’s taken the biggest shit recently, ideally adjusting the shit rankings to reflect the size of the person.

I have no idea how feasible it is – could the bracelet send electric signals through you to weigh you before and after a bowel movement? – but I think it’d be a ton of fun.

My 1 friend from high school who married my neighbor – both of them Fit Bit owners – said he’d get one, though he says his wife would win since even though she's petite she “births bricks”.

My one friend who runs an integrated homelessness / domestic violence would have one too, and compete with me online.

She was wondering about what characteristics it’d monitor – I suggested liquidity and splatterness – and she suggested “pounds per square inch” (I think she meant cubic inch, as a type of density measure).

Her brother also suggested that you could take a picture of your shit with your iPhone and your phone could let you know if you had any medical problems, but that seemed like an old person Shit Bit and not the fun youthful product that I had in mind…

I also wondered in a thought that I kept to myself, how many fetishists would check out your blog, if you had a photoblog of every shit you took, just like some people take photos of every meal…

I bet someone’s already done that or is already doing that, but who knows, maybe it’s a niche market and even a new shitblog would be successful.

In any case, I really do think Shit Bit’d be a hit; it’d not only be fun, it’d be a great flat-out gift, not just a great gag gift.

If I had more time, I’d get a techie collaborator, put together a prototype, and get the hell on Kickstarter.

I’d also make sure to manufacture it in the U.S.A., even if that meant reduced profit margins…  We could make sure a little American flag was on the box, or a “Made in the U.S.A.” label tied to the biometric bracelet.

Shit Bit!